In the closing pages of The Progressive Historians, Richard Hofstadter
made an eloquent plea for a “vital kind of moral consensus” to sustain
the American political center. His counsel to clashing interests to respect the right of principled opposition was a message teeming with
self-interest. The liberal sun was setting. The radical Right, Far Left,
black power movement, hippies and yippies may have stood separately
in small numbers outside the political mainstream, but combined, their
challenge to the two-party system could not be ignored. Deeply concerned with the fate of comity in an era of political polarization, Hofstadter produced The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840. The work is both a blueprint of the
birth of pluralism and a provocative rejoinder to those who dismissed
liberalism as a spent force in American political life. As John William
Ward cogently observed in a review of its contents, “If we are dissatisfied today with party politics, The Idea of a Party System is a fine place to
begin to think about the sources of our discontent.”1

It is, in some respects, an unusual Hofstadter book. It lacks the bold
revisionism and social-psychological insights that distinguished its author's most controversial scholarship. Published by the University of
California Press (the manuscript was tied to a lecture series at Berkeley),
it reads much like the kind of monographic history that Hofstadter typically avoided. Keeping in mind its 1969 publication date, one might assume that The Idea of a Party System was conceived in response to the political radicalism of the sixties, but its author's interest in the topic arose

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